Professor Damien Lacroix takes MultiSim Research to Japan

Japanese Temple in Kyoto

On Monday 23rd February 2015 MultiSim director, Professor Damien Lacroix, embarked on a 5 month visit to Kyoto, Japan, on to work alongside Professor Taiji Adachi. The trip will be highly beneficial for MultiSim research as it will enable Professor Lacroix to study multi-scale methods to further bridge the scale between cellular up to whole organism level.

Professor Taiji Adachi works in the Department of Biomechanics, Research Centre for Nano Medical Engineering, Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University. Originally his research activities have been focussed on the computational biomechanics of functional adaptation by re-modelling in bone that had mechanical hierarchy in structure-function relationships from the macroscopic organ/tissues level to the microscopic cell/molecular levels. During the last decade he has been working on the response of bone cells through to the mechanical stimulus through in vitro experiments.

Professor Adachi and his research group aims to clarify the mechanisms by which cells sense mechanical stimuli and regulate their activities in tissue adaptation, regeneration and stem cell differentiation in morphogenesis. To better understand the mechano-regulation of these dynamical processes through the complex hierarchical structure-function relationships, bridging spatial and temporal scales from microscopic molecular/cellular activities to macroscopic tissue behaviours is fundamental.

This research visit will enable Professor Lacroix to interact with Professor Adachi and his team so that fruitful exchanges of ideas emerge from the discussions and new collaborations can be set up. Such discussions should result in new ways and approaches to simulate the biomechanical processes at the molecular and cellular levels so that they can be integrated into the existing MultiSim tissue, organ and body scales. It is hoped that this research visit will benefit to the overall MultiSim programme and also to Insigneo in general by bringing new collaboration and expertise in in silico modelling at the molecular and cellular levels.

The MultiSim vision is to develop a computational platform that is currently not possible. Overcoming the currently insurmountable challenges in biological systems which arise from overlapping scales, partially observable states, and uncertainty MultiSim will provide the Virtual Physiological Human (VPH) breakthrough and will also enable the development of much needed models of other complex engineering problems.

The depth of the MultiSim vision will be achieved by applying radically new approaches to modelling the musculoskeletal system by integrating all interactions across space-time from the cellular scale up to the whole organism scale. The multi-scale model will be created from a partially identified input obtained by fusing a generic atlas of the anatomy, physiology, biology and biomechanics for each individual. This framework will be integrated in an efficient hypermodelling approach, numerically optimised at each scale level.

We will be following and recording Professor Lacroix’s research journey with regular blogs about his experiences in Japan. Also keep an eye out on Twitter for MultiSim research programme updates 24×7.